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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Re: st: looping over parallel lists - is there a alternative to "for"?

I suppose you can have three globals and then have one loop to loop
through them? Some samples can be found in C Baum's "A little bit of
Stata programming goes a long way ..."

http://www.stata.com/meeting/11uk/baum.pdf

I quite like the -for- command as well, sometimes I only want to loop
one line of command and using commands like -forvalue- and -foreach-
gets a bit complicated. And speaking for myself, using -for- would
save me from making typos like using ) instead of }.

On 3/16/06, Gawrich Stefan <s.gawrich@hlpug.hessen.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I do a lot of routine or repetitive data analysis and use loops and lists
> frequently (btw, thx to Nick Cox, his "How to fact lists with fortitude"
> helped me a lot).
>
> I'm wondering why the "for"-command is officialy out of date in Stata while
> one of it's best features - the use of parallel lists - can't be done
> otherwise. Or am I missing something?
>
> One example: I routinely map ten different diseases with tmap and save the
> maps as a graphic file.
>
> for var var1-var10 \ any "Disease1" "Disease2" [...] \ any "Filename1"
> "Filename2" [...] : ///
> tmap choro X, id(county) map("county-Coordinates.dta") title("Y") \ graph
> export "Z.png", replace
>
> In this example each graph is determined by something like a 3-tuple of
> variable, title and saving-filename.
> This is just basic code, in real life the code blows up and becomes hard to
> read, as we all know, "for" has some disadvantages.
> So if it can be done in a more structured manner, I would like to know...
>
> Best wishes
>
> Dr. Stefan Gawrich
> Hesse State Health Office
> Wolframstr. 33
> 35683 Dillenburg
>
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